Episode 26: Peter McCracken of ShipIndex.org
Rough Transcript for Episode 26: Peter McCracken of ShipIndex.org
Heather (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to the Commons Stacks podcast. This is the show that brings together professionals from within the library world, as well as interesting experts from other professions to engage in discussions around issues affecting libraries. Looking at the ways in which libraries are dispelling the myth of, well, this is how it's always been done. I am your host, Heather Teysko, and this is episode 26. It's an interview with Peter McCracken of ShipIndex.org.
Heather (00:33):
This podcast is brought to you by Library Lever, a new kind of library buying club. Do you know how much you're paying in transaction fees when you purchase databases and resources through the buying club you're using? Now, most buying clubs in consortia add a surcharge of anywhere from between four to 12% to your price from the vendor. We have a different model. You don't have to pay fees. There's no joining fee. We pass on a hundred percent of the discount to the library. So see how much you can save by ordering your next database through Library Lever at library lever.com/calculator. Now, let me tell you about Peter McCracken. If you don't already know him, Peter has been an electronic resources librarian at Cornell University since 2016. Prior to joining Cornell, Peter worked as a reference librarian at East Carolina University and the University of Washington in 2000, he co-founded Serials Solutions, which was acquired by ProQuest in 2004.
Heather (01:30):
In 2009, he co-founded Shipindex.org, which helps people do research on vessels. Peter received the Ulrich Serials Librarianship Award in 2011 for his work with Serial Solutions, and was honored with a distinguished alumni award from U N C School of Information and Library Science in 2012. He has published scholarly and nons scholarly articles in many journals and wrote a quarterly column titled Maritime History on the Internet in C History Magazine from 2004 to 2020. In 2019, he was a co-author of Techniques for Electronic Resources Management, ALA's, first Open Access Monograph. We start out with Peter explaining exactly what ShipIndex.org is and the background to it.
Peter (02:32):
Well, I was, I grew up in Seattle. I was born and raised in Seattle, a lot of boats in Seattle, big maritime city there. And I went to college in Ohio. At Oberlin Colleges, there's not, not a lot of water there. And just before I graduated from college, I learned about this program called the Williams College Mystic Seaport Program in American Maritime Studies. And I thought, oh, that, that really intrigued me. I think a couple of years before my mother and brother and I had drove, driven across the country and visited. We saw all the sites, you know, and, and we visited the Seaport, and I really enjoyed it then. And so basically, I, I enrolled in that program. I had one more. I was able to delay graduating from college for one semester to do this program at Mystic Seaport.
More...
Peter (03:18):
And I, I found maritime history so interesting and so meaningful. And so much of American history is based on maritime history. So much world history is based on maritime history, and perhaps we don't think about it as much as we, as, as we might have in the past. But, you know, before the development of the telegram, for example, long distance communication was primarily by sea. And of course, before the, the development of the, the, the broad use of airplanes immigration was also primarily by sea. Nearly everyone living in north America today, not everyone, but nearly everyone can date back ancestors to those who, who came by sea. Some did come by land, absolutely over the land Ridge, the North or from, or Central and South America, but many, many of us came and most of us came by sea.
Peter (04:17):
So those are an area that interested me a lot. After graduating from college, finishing college, I went back home to Seattle and spent a a year there working at a, in a law a law firm actually. I thought what I really wanted to do, I realized was go to library school. So I drove back across the country, back to Mystic, actually, and I spent the spring in the summer working at the Seaport. And then, and while I was there, someone told me about a program in maritime history at U N C Chapel Hill, which is where I was headed for library school. So I got to Chapel Hill. I, I got myself set up, and then I went to the history department to learn about their maritime history program. And I learned it, actually, it's not at U N C, but at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina.
Peter (05:01):
There are only two masters programs in maritime history in the United States, which, which I think is a real a real shame because it, again, I think that maritime history is so important. Well, in the summer, between my two years of library school, I worked at the main Maritime Museum up in Bath, Maine. And I would work on, you know, learning a little bit about the se ships of steel that were built there. And to do any research on any of those, any of those vessels, I'd go, I'd have to go book by book by book in the library to look at the indexes and see which books mentioned that particular vessel. And that was, you know, that would take some time. And it was limited to the books in that collection. And visitors to the, to the library couldn't actually do that either, because at the time it was a closed stack collection.
Peter (05:50):
So that was where the very first idea for what became ShipIndex came from. And after that after I finished my library degree, I did go to East Carolina and started their master's program in maritime history there and working in their rare and special collections. There was a, a journal that these two characters walked from Alabama down to New Orleans in the winter of 1819. And then one of 'em took a, a, a ship back up the Mississippi in spring of 1820, I think it was called the General Butler. And I thought, well, how can I find out something about this ship? The General Butler, that's all I know. In the year 1820 in the location somewhere on the Mississippi River. And there was, I couldn't think of any way of doing that. So I'd been at East Carolina for a year and a half or two in the library there, and I got an opportunity to return to Seattle and work in the undergraduate library at the University of Washington.
Peter (06:47):
And so doing that when I was there, I actually started then scanning in the indexes to books that mentioned a lot of vessels, things like the McCurdy, Marine history of the Pacific Northwest or Fair Burn's Merchant Sale. And this guy Fairburn, wrote, wrote a six or seven volume set that he titled Merchant Sale about New England ship building and, and and Atlanta, Canada as well. And then he just mailed it to libraries around the country. And and he is got this huge index. I think the whole last volume is an index. So when I was at the reference desk waiting for undergraduates to come up, I would be working through this. I'd scanned all the pages, and I started creating a, basically a static set of web pages. Well I did I then did shift gears a little bit, and with my brothers and a high school friend, we founded Serials Solutions, which helps helped libraries, still helps, I guess in a sense.
Peter (07:43):
It does still kind of exist helps libraries manage electronic resources. We founded that in 2000. It was pretty successful. And in 2002, I left working at the University of Washington to do serial solutions full-time. And so I had to take the website that I, by then the database that I'd created with University of Washington Resources and take it away. And, and the database guy at, at Serial Solutions turned it into a little database. And I got a website, ShipIndex.org, cuz just, it was just a side project. And then in 2004, the company was acquired by ProQuest. In 2007 serious Solutions was acquired by ProQuest Hero Solutions. I'm sorry, yes. I hadn't even started ShipIndex yet. Yeah. In 2007 we moved to Ithaca, New York, where my wife took a job on the faculty at Ithaca College. And in 2009, as I, I like to say, I decided I care more about maritime histories than I do about eural Access and Management.
Peter (08:45):
And decided to make ShipIndex a full-time project. I left ProQuest at that point and started internShipIndex into a a for-profit company for someone to grab the ShipIndex.com url. And so it's always been.org ever since. Sure. So we've been working away on it since then. So it's been actually been quite a while. And in 2017, 2016, I applied for and was lucky enough to be offered a position as a, an electronic resources librarian at Cornell University. So my primary focus is, is Cornell, but like it seems, every, everybody at Cornell, there's, there's got a side, I've got a side thing going on. And for me that's ShipIndex.org.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Sure. And what actually is, is ShipIndex.
Peter (09:41):
Shipindex.org is a guide to the vessels that are mentioned in books, websites, databases, journals anything I can find where the resources in English. And it covers any time period. So any named vessel that is in an an English language resource could, could be added to the database. I started off with many older books. And then and, you know, I've always <laugh> luckily have for the last 25 years or 23 years, I've lived within a couple of miles of an a r l library, the University of Washington, and now Cornell. So I've always had those resources that I could, I could go to and I could use. So it, I, I take the indexes to these books or these websites, and I put them into the database. All of the work that I did before I turned it into an actual company, plus a collection of subject headings in WorldCat are in the completely free version of the database.
Peter (10:49):
So it's a freemium model. There's about 150,000 citations in the free database, and there's over 3.1, almost 3.2 million citations in the subscription database. And everything that I've added since then has gone into the subscription database. So one of the neat things that's in the completely couple of neat things are in the completely free database. First, it's the big all of the big books that I could find early on, you know, the Starbucks history of American Whale Fisheries, and, and as I mentioned before merchant Sale and the ur Marine history of the Pacific Northwest and me other books, I think there's about 75 resources in there, in there, plus the subject headings from WorldCat. So any, any, I had some folks at WorldCat who created this, this list for me. It was really useful. And so any resource that is either buy or about a ship from WorldCat is in the free database. And there's some amazing ways that the, that the re these resources can, can help people who are doing, doing research. Yeah. Anyway, since then I've added lots of online databases as well. And then every other resource that I've been able to find since then.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
So, and yeah. So how are people, how are people using this? What, what I'm thinking genealogists, I'm thinking researchers in different areas. What, what are, what are the use cases?
Peter (12:17):
Yeah, so my, my interest is in making maritime history research easier to do, right? I, I, I care deeply about maritime history and I love maritime history, and I, and I wanna make it easier for folks to actually do maritime history. So that's the, that's the intention of the database. But genealogists really do use it and they love it and find it very useful. And, and I've been to a bunch of genealogy conferences and I've learned a lot about genealogy since I started this. And they have this phrase that I love called adding leaves to the tree, right? The primary focus of genealogy is learning about is, is identifying and, and learning about your ancestors. And, and, you know, that's the, as that should be, the, the people are absolutely central to the work that genealogists are doing, but then adding those leaves, adding those other bits.
Peter (13:11):
So a couple of examples that, that people might do might, it might be that you are writing up a record of your family history and you'd like to add an image of the ship that your parents or grandparents or great grandparents went on their honeymoon on, for example. But so that's a neat little bit, but there are some ways that a, you can really learn a whole lot more if you have the service record for an ancestor who served on a vessel in the Navy or in, in the military, or was on a vessel at a certain point or served on a merchant vessel as well. You, you know, what dates they were on, on that vessel, but you don't know what happened to them. What you can use ShipIndex to learn a history about those vessels. And even though the books that you find and that tell you about the history of that vessel, don't mention your ancestors. You already know they were on board. So you know that this is relevant to your own family's history.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Right? Right.
Peter (14:11):
And then the, what I kind of think is like the, the, the, the, the wildest possibility, and to be honest, I've never heard of anybody who's actually succeeded at this is Uhhuh, but if you know the vessels that your ancestor immigrated on, right? And you, the vessel that they immigrated on, and you were to find a record
Peter (14:28):
Through, through World Cat and specifically through Muck, the National Union catalog of manuscript collections, those resources are, are essentially in WorldCat. You were able to find someone's patent handwritten journal that they kept while they were on board that voyage. And, you know, again, they may not mention your ancestors, but I mean, what if they do, do, they may not mention those ancestors, but they describe that voyage and you have already established that your ancestor was on that voyage. So wouldn't that be an incredible resource to discover that? There's no other way you would find it, cuz there, there probably is no mention of your ancestors in there, but you have established, again, that, that, that it is relevant to your ancestors' story.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
Right? I looked up my dad's ship that he came over from Livee on in the 1950s, and so that was fun. I looked it up and then I sent it to him and I was like, dad, was this the ship? And he was like, yeah, that's it. So, so that was kind of fun this morning, just that so I can, I
Peter (15:31):
Went to a genealogy conference in Cincinnati maybe 10 years ago, and this guy came up to me and he kind of barked this name of a, a vessel at me. And so, you know, okay, alright, fine. So I type in the, the, the name of the ship and I, two or three clicks, and literally in like five to 10 seconds, I have this image of a vessel there. He's go, oh my goodness, oh my, that's the ship that I came to America on when I was five years old. And he, he ran, get his wife, and he came back and he pulled his camera out. He was taking a picture with his camera of the screen. So of course I had to pull up my phone and take a picture of him taking a picture of the screen, you know, the information of course. But that was really neat. That was a neat experience.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
Yeah. Yeah. And I can imagine for like researchers I'm also thinking in the world of like historical fiction writers who want to make sure that their historical, that their stuff is on, like if they have somebody coming over on a certain vessel knowing about that would be also really useful. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. So a lot, a lot of different cases I, I could see. So are these mostly, who are you, you're selling to individuals, right? And you're also selling to libraries and you're, so are academic libraries, public libraries? I've seen some public libraries subscribe, and I'm thinking with the ancestry combination, that would be a good mix in the genealogy. And then for academics, the more research side who you're just kind of selling to everybody here, aren't you?
Peter (16:57):
<Laugh>? Yes. I have a, a two different sales structures. One is, you know, individual username and password individuals subscribe for two weeks for, for a set period of time, they can choose two weeks, three months, a year or they can do monthly renewing. It's their choice. And that's with username and password. And then for institutions, I offer IP authentication and I can, I do a couple of different things. If, if folks are not using IP authentication, we have a variety of different ways that we can set up. But it is really important to me that the whole, you know, everybody at that institution can access it. It should be an easy way of, of, of accessing it. And I do absolutely believe that any institution that has students or grad students or faculty doing any kind of historical research will find it useful.
Peter (17:52):
Not everybody, but, but, but one, one person once said to me, well, you know unfortunately you know, I'm an Arizona State University and we don't have any, we're surrounded by sand, you know, we don't, I'm like, well, wait a minute. You have naval historians, you have Asian historians, you have European historians, you have early US historians and, and then for public libraries, in fact, you know, for local history, it can be really useful as well. There was a guy from the Washington, Washington State Department of Transportation who was doing research in it because he's trying to determine where an anchor that was dredged up. While I think they were repairing one of the ferry landings, of course, lots of fairies in the northwest in, in the Puget Sound. And, and they, they pulled up an anchor and they were trying to figure out what vessel it came from.
Peter (18:47):
And I think they had a couple of names of possible ships. And so they, they could use the database to try to research each of those ships or the, that there was a s schooner, I think that was discovered in, you know, in the southern tip of Manhattan a number of years ago during a building a putting up a new building, these other areas where folks doing local history may want to be, try to figure out which ship this is that they have found an artifact from, or the hole from.
Heather (19:21):
Yeah. And for ships, like I, I just went on in, in another life. I am a podcaster on tutor history and I looked up Mary Rose, right? Cuz that's a famous, the Mary Rose. And of course there's like a ton of ships called the Mary Rose. So you have it broken down, and it was very easy for me to find, okay, the one that sank and that, that Mary Rose in in 1545 or 40 whenever it was. But so you have it broken down, so it's very easy to use and very easy to, to search. And obviously you're a librarian, so you built it for librarians and research in mind. But that was really super easy for me to find that <laugh>. That's great.
Peter (19:59):
That that was a big change that we ha implemented and are constantly, we implemented a couple of years ago and are constantly working on, if you look for a ship, a vessel with, with a woman's name like Elizabeth or Susan or Mary, you'll find thousands of citations. Now it is hard for us to know for certain which vessel a citation is referring to. So when you look at Mary Rose, you'll see a lot of citations that are not affiliated with one particular pole, we could say. And that's either because we can't, probably because we can't tell from the citation and we take as much citation as there is in the resource, and maybe it just says Mary Rose, or maybe it gives a bit more information. We haven't made a a connection yet. The naval vessels are the easiest ones to do because they often have hall numbers.
Peter (20:53):
And so we can then more clearly differentiate them. But still, you know, you've got there've been eight or nine u s s wasps in the American Navy. And so that's a great example of where they, we've wanted to differentiate between them. And the thing that we've done there is that we're using Wiki data identifiers. I I really didn't know how to differentiate between these between different vessels in a way that would be useful beyond my database. Until a colleague suggested said, you know, I think you should use a Wiki data identifier here. And I didn't know anything about Wiki data identifiers. I probably didn't know anything about Wiki data, which is a, the, a database that underlies essentially all of the Wikipedias. So, you know, you have a Wikipedia entry about USS Constitution in English, and then you've got a separate Wikipedia entry about USS Constitution in another, another language, and is not a translation of it is separately written by people in different, you know, who, who are writing in, say, German or Finn or, or Chinese or Russian or Spanish or whatever language, but they all want to have something to connect it together.
Peter (22:07):
And so that is this Q identifier from Wiki data, and you can add lots of content in a, in a database format. So just a, a specific piece of information in Wiki data about when Constitution was launched, say how much it cost, and who was the, the designer, et cetera. So anyway, by using that Wiki data identifier, I'm hoping that there will be ways that the database will be more useful for linked data applications, because if you're working on vessels without knowing anything about ShipIndex.org except the structure, you can know what the URL will be to get to whatever information we have that is about that particular vessel.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
Gotcha. And you're, you've just got humans doing all of this. Is there any kind of AI involved or is
Peter (23:00):
Like this that work is all humans? It's the only, the only way that I can think of to do it. I am exploring, I, we have been trying, a number of years ago we tried to do something using technology called entity extraction, where I really wanted to find a way to identify vessels in unindexed sets of data that could be the whole J store corpus, or it could be a whole bunch of a large collection in newspapers. Say I, I got the New York Herald, I think a, a colleague a maritime historian said that's the r that, you know, it's not the New York Times when you're going in the, the 19th century that had most of the vessel records. It was actually the New York. I don't think it's quite the Herald. I don't remember the name of that newspaper offhand, but like, they're not indexed.
Peter (23:55):
And so what can you do? So we did this project with very smart folks in Palo Alto who tried to, who had, you know, PhD in computer science and a PhD in linguistics and like, can you create this and make it work? And the answer at the time was, no, we couldn't. But I've recently learned about a new tool and I'm exploring the possibility of using AI there where hopefully we could start doing a little bit of tagging. We do a, a pile of tagging and we teach the, the the program how to find vessels in this set of unindexed data. To me, if we could do that, that would just be, be huge.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
Right. That's awesome. Very cool. That, yeah. So what, how is, this is something that's completely a, a separate sort of thing from serial solutions. How, and, and it's been going li the way you describe it, you've been doing this for 20 years now, building this out, kind of on and off. So how has this been different in terms of setting this up from your other business and, and what have been some of the sorts of challenges that you've seen as you've set this up?
Peter (25:11):
The, the differences between serial Solutions and ShipIndex are, I mean, there are a few similarities. I, I actually gave a presentation at the Charleston Conference once comparing changes in cereal's titles to changes in ship names and ships change names, ships are misrepresented in many different resources. And, you know, so there, there, it was a little bit of a, it wasn't too much of a reach, it was pretty similar. But the companies are very, very different serial solutions. We started in 2000 and we were acquired in 2004. I mean, and when we were acquired, we had 38 employees, I wanna say. I mean, we were, we were a pretty, I would say a pretty big concern at that time. And, and of course we had, we were, there's no question that it, it solved a problem that, that people really identified. And, and we did it very well. We had a lot of really smart people working there at ShipIndex. We, we, ShipIndex was founded in 2009, so luckily it hasn't quite been 20 years yet, but it's not too far off.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
But didn't you say you bought the.org early shipment x.org
Peter (26:36):
Or? I did, but it was just a side thing. It was just to store that stuff and make it available after I left the University of Washington. And I do joke at at ShipIndex that, I mean, you know, I'm the sole, basically the, the sole employee. And so, you know, I've got this boss who tells me to do stuff that I don't want to do, and I've got an employee who doesn't do the stuff that I tell him to do. And so sometimes it can be a little bit difficult. And very importantly, I have a day job that I very much enjoy and, and I want to keep and I want to do well at. But I've got people who have been helping me for many years. My, my, my main, the guy who I go to the most, he's been I hired him as a, as a graduate assistant when I was working in the undergraduate library at the University of Washington.
Peter (27:28):
And then he was hired at Serial Solutions a couple of times. And so, you know, we have been working together for 20 plus years now easily. And I had another serial solutions librarian, also librarian, who was working with me working with us for a while. And then I have a couple people doing, doing bits and pieces. Here it is absolutely a labor of love. And it's something that, but for this year, I have actually made some changes in the, in, in the amount of time that I'm working in my day job, and so that I have a little bit more time to pay attention to ShipIndex. So I'm very excited about what 2023 will bring.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
And what are your plans for 2023 then?
Peter (28:12):
Well, this the, the work that I described in exploring the UNINDEXED data would be huge. If, if that's something that we could, we could break through, that would really be great. The, the data team that I have will continue working on data and, and making these associations to connect more and more of the resources, the citations to specific Q identifiers and some of the, the big ones. We, well, we have many, many entries for a specific vessel because we have a separate, the, we have all of these directories from every year. These are vessels that are not in Wiki data. I'd like to add a lot of those vessels to wiki data and grow the, I would love to be more involved with, with the SHIP community in Wikidata. And it's a fairly small, kind of a nascent group.
Peter (29:10):
There's not a lot going on there right now, to be honest. Not, not like some other areas, some other parts of Wiki data. Another thing that I, I, because I've mentioned, as I've mentioned before, the maritime history aspect of this is very important to me. And so any, I I've, I had just before the pandemic, I was doing a lot of work with the Council of American Maritime Museums, which is the, you know, group of 120, 130 different maritime museums in the country. And we, we put together a deal where I, I, I offer the database for free to any member of cam any of these institutions, because I like the idea that people will go to this institution to do research and be able to use this database to do their own research. And maybe this is a reason why they go to that maritime museum mm-hmm. <Affirmative>.
Peter (30:03):
So I like that a lot, and I hope to extend that a bit more. And then then there's just trying to make the, the, the business work a little bit better. Reaching out to more individual subscribers is something I'm, I have also been working on. And that has been very hard because, because we're in index, Google doesn't care about indexes anymore, you know, well, not anymore. I don't know that they ever really did it. If you look at a web at a ShipIndex results page, there are not a lot of words there. You know, you do a Google search for how to make a gin and tonic, and you're gonna get 10 paragraphs about the history of gin and the history of tonic and how to measure liquids, and you know, where all this comes from before you ever get to a little suggestion down at the bottom about what your mixture should be, because Google thinks that more words is better.
Peter (31:03):
And so it has, it has been a real challenge for me in having this what, what appears to be, I mean, what is an index? But mm-hmm. <Affirmative> to me, if you know that this, this book exists, it mentions the vessel that your ancestor served on. You're, you're three quarters of the way there, you might not have. And of course, I got links to finding a library through rollca. You might not be close, but you, but I'm like, go to your local public library. They will get this book for you, and then be sure you, you, you know, three in a library borrowing, and then be sure you've give them a little money for doing that and supporting them.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
Final question, how can a library learn more and if they're interested or an inter an interested human who's not a librarian, a a person, how could people learn more?
Peter (31:50):
Well, the best thing to do is to go to ShipIndex.org, take a look at the database and, and, and, and actually just use the database because there are a lot of really useful results in the free part of the database. For individuals, I have kept the subscription very, very low. I think $6 for two weeks of access. An individual can track a particular ship name, so they're notified when, whenever new content is added. So you can say, Hey okay, I've searched everything I can find about this vessel right now. I'm gonna let my two weeks run out, but I'm gonna keep this account not the subscription, but the account. And then over the course of the next year or two, you get occasionally get emails to say, you know, information has been added. And you can decide if you wanna subscribe again to check out the new stuff or, or else, you know, that probably not relevant to then you've found everything that exists at that time.
Peter (32:49):
For institutions, of course, like any any seller to libraries, we're happy to set up a trial. I am an electronic resources librarian during the day, so I would like to think that chip index.org is the most e resource friendly vendor on in the world. You know, absolutely out there. I, I know what, what the folks who are on the other side are doing because that's what I do during the day with other resources. And so I try to make it as easy as possible. And if a, a vendor says to me, well, you know, can we use easy proxy with Youa? Like, I know what that means, and absolutely the answer is absolutely yes. <Laugh>,
Speaker 3 (33:34):
Yes. Perfect. Chip index.org. Is there anything that I missed here that you would like to throw in here that I've that I've missed or glossed over?
Peter (33:45):
So I think that there's a lot of other ways that the database can be used. The searching is, is more powerful than it appears. And I often get asked questions about if you can search for a captain in the database, for example. And the, the truth is, the truth is kind of the focus is absolutely on vessels, but often, sometimes citations will have the name of a captain in there. So you can type in the name of a captain, and when you do that search, it's always gonna do a search for ships with that name. But if you can, you can click on the expand search button and, and then you can look to see if that, if it's actually, there's a captain's name in a citation for a vessel. And then there are a lot of ways that you can minimize use.
Peter (34:37):
I mean, the fact of the matter is, I believe that this database is the, probably the largest collection of vessel names. And so in a sense it's the most authoritative collection a place to go to, to confirm a vessel name, for example. I've never thought about its utility in cataloging, but I think that that is actually there. I think that, I mean, because if you look at the Charles W. Morgan American Whaling Ship, which is still a Mystic Seaport which sailed up from, from, from Boston to no, not to, they sailed to Boston from New London a number of years ago. The name of the ship is very clear. It says Charles W. Morgan on the back of the ship. But still you can find half a dozen different entries in World Catch for this particular ship. And so Catalogers used ShipIndex to ensure they were u they using the most reliable name for that vessel. I think that they could actually, they could actually use it that way to ensure that getting the best the most accurate ship names. Hadn't thought about that one before. Yeah,
Speaker 3 (35:50):
Look at that. Awesome. Awesome. Well I know we're excited to move forward with you at Library Lover, and I hope that people listening this are excited. I'm excited. You know, this is cool. So thank you for taking the time to, to speak with me and tell me all the history behind this and and everything. I I really enjoyed this conversation, so, so
Peter (36:12):
Thank you. Great. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it.
Heather (36:15):
Thanks to Peter McCracken for taking the time to chat all about shipindex.org. Check it out, it's a really cool resource. And hey, hop into our community and share your takeaways, thoughts, community dot library lever.com. We will be back in a couple of weeks. Until then, we'll see you all over the internet. Bye-Bye.